Balance of Fragile Things Read Online Free Page A

love, but deep down she knew that entering dresser drawers and lifting dust ruffles with the intention of unearthing clusters of fleshy chanterelle fragrant with teen angst was necessary. Maija’s mother, whom she called Ma while almost everyone else referred to her as Oma, wouldn’t have even paused before looking, Maija reassured herself. If she’d bothered at all.
    Oma’s interest had always been, in Maija’s eyes, in the lives of others. After Papa had passed away, it was as though Oma’s identity as a mother had vanished along with her identity as a wife, leaving Maija alone. When they had first immigrated to Cleveland through the sponsorship of a Latvian Baptist church, Maija would go through Oma’s things in hopes of feeling closer to her. Sneaking Oma’s cameo around her neck had comforted her as she’d fought through the Ohio school system’s remedial classes with disabled students, students branded as “slow” and other immigrants who struggled with the English language.
    Oma would open this box and say that everything in her house was hers anyway, Maija thought as she sat at the foot of Isabella’s bed. But still she hesitated.
    She could still hear Montel Williams telling mothers that snooping was not right. His eyes had glimmered, his teeth had glistened, and his hairless head had glowed. Though she knew Montel meant to defend teen privacy to an audience of mothers, his piece only motivated her to scour Vic’s and Isabella’s bedrooms for secrets.
    She imagined all the possible terrors stashed within Isabella’s box: marijuana (the devil’s weed), weapons (perhaps a gun), or, worse, the Pill. Like Pandora, whose all-gifted hands released the evils of the world and left poor Elpis, hope, in the jar, Maija opened the lid. She puzzled at the contents. If they were emblematic of her daughter’s inner self, they weren’t going to expose their secrets easily. She perused the items that belonged in the garbage: bottle caps, bits of string, paper clips linked together in a circle, a leaf, a ball of used rubber bands, Band-Aids, and gauze pads. Maija caressed the ordinary office supplies, searching for signs of rebellion. What did these items say about Isabella? It could mean she had a strange desire to collect dirty things; there was a term for that affliction—yes, hoarding. Or perhaps these were simply here to throw someone like Maija off a trail; she was a clever girl.
    Maija dug further, and under the odd collection of stickers she found the treasure of all parenting treasures: a diary. She opened the first page and shut it immediately. Then she slowly opened it again and flipped quickly through the whole book. She saw some sort of code: BFF, 2GTBT, 459, 4EAE, BTWIAILWU. None of these codes made sense to Maija. Was Isabella in trouble? The only codes that Maija knew were pharmacological: OTC (over the counter), QOD (every other day), PO (for the mouth), and BID (twice a day). She closed the book and tried to forget everything that had taken place over the previous few minutes. She wished she’d never opened it in the first place.
    The phone rang, and Maija jumped. In a rush, she rearranged the box the way she had found it and put it back under Isabella’s bed in the same place. Guilt and regret began to build in her heart. She wished she could forget what just happened and pretend that there wasn’t a code to decipher. It was her deepest flaw, that she could see the futures of others but not of her loved ones. What good was being a psychic at all? She shuffled her slipper-clad feet to the piss-yellow kitchen to the phone. The walls looked dreadful during the afternoon, when the fluorescent lights had to be turned on above the sink. “Summer Apricot, my dÅ«re .” Maija rolled her Rs. “Curse you, Lowe’s employee who sold me this paint.”
    The phone rang a third time, and Maija picked it up.
    â€œHallo?